flashed to 623-3 -> no boot, 2 LEDs stay on

[Ezekiel]

Thanks again to everyone for the suggestions, I'm still having a bit of a problem, but at least I know my rig isn't completely hosed

 

Here's my current situation :

 

My rig takes about 1-2 minutes to cold boot; at first I get no video signal, no bios beeps, and diagnostic LEDs 2 and 4 stay lit.

 

After a minute or two, the bios seems to finally kick in; the chipset fan slow down, the diagnostic LEDs restart their normal cycle (4 LEDs lit, 3, 2...) and the rig posts fine; I was only able to run a couple of hours of Prime95 and a few runs of 3DMark2005, but things seem to be working. I can also warm boot in a normal way; however, any attempt to shutdown the rig will result in the same problem on the next cold boot.

 

I've also attempted to flash bios 632-1 (again from the bootable CD found on the thread I linked in my original post); since my problem began immediatly after flashing to 632-3, I was hoping it might be the result of a bad flash.

No luck there, though : after flashing to 632-1, my board still exhibits the symptoms described above.

 

Any thoughts ? While I can again use my PC, this strange boot up behaviour has me a little worried that there is ultimately something wrong with my bios, which might result in further problems down the road.

 

Edit: forgot to mention, I did trick the 'hold insert during boot' method; no change there, holding insert during the 'dead' phase of the boot shows no results.

 

Thanks in advance !

[EvoFighter]

It might be your VGA card, I am not very sure though. I have a Quadro card also give me that delay cold boot on a Sis chipset P4 system. After I use a Nvidia MX440 to test, it boot instantly.

 

Or maybe you can try the other PCI-E slot.

[Ezekiel]

Thanks for the suggestion

 

Unfortunately for me, changing the card to the other 16x PCI-E slot did not solve my problem (which would have been a bit of a surprise, considering the rig used to boot normally pre flashing to 623-3, but it was worth a shot)

 

I'm starting to believe that my bios has somehow become corrupt in the flashing process; could that be causing the strange boot up behaviour ? and if so, does anyone know if it is possible to get a replacement bios chip from DFI Europe ? (preferably without sending the entire board for RMA )

[Guest Spartacus]

I don't think the chip itself is corrupt. If it was bad, the system would most likely be dead. I think they made some kind of change in the 6-23 BIOS versions that is causing this. I'm actually using the BIOS chip from my DFI NF3 with the 6-23-2 NF4 BIOS as I wanted to try a different flash chip when I was troubleshooting my problem. It's a Winbond chip vs. the stock SST chip. Works fine and the same as you are getting.

 

You could try flashing back to the 3-10 or whatever it was that you were running before you had this problem. After the flash, do a battery out CMOS clear for a little while to completely clear the setup registers.

 

That may put things back to normal for you. I haven't tried this myself because the short delay on cold boots isn't a big problem for me.